It is interesting but perhaps not surprising that,
as this conflict-torn century nears its end, the
shadows cast over it by the Great War of 1914-1918
seem in some ways longer, darker, and more
daunting than ever before. For what that struggle
meant and did changed the course of history more
than any other in modern times, including its great
successor war of 1939-1945. Consider only a
few of the consequences of the Great War, offered
here in no particular order. It brought the end of
the Romanovs, the rise of the Bolsheviks, and the
emergence of a Communist system that blighted
so much of humanity for the rest of the century.
The war also made possible the growth of Fascism
and its peculiar German variant, anti-Semitic National
Socialism. This ghastly and expensive
struggle shattered a Eurocentric world order, shifted
the financial center of gravity to New York,
nurtured Japanese expansionism in East Asia, and,
at the same time, stimulated anticolonial
movements from West Africa to Indonesia.

The aerial bomber, the U-boat, and poison gas brought
mechanization to the art of killing, making
the latter less personal and yet also more far-reaching
in its effects. Industrialized labor, trade
unions, and socialist parties gained in power, while
the landed interest declined. The social and
political position of women was transformed in various
aspects, despite predictable resistance. The
war produced a cultural crisis, in the arts, in
ideas, religion, literature, and life styles. It also
exacerbated ethnic and religious hatreds, in Ireland,
the Balkans, and Armenia, that scar the
European landscape today. The Great War is therefore
not some distant problem about dead white
males on and off the battlefields. Its origins,
course, and consequences are central to an
understanding of the twentieth century.
-Paul Kennedy, from
his
review in the New York Review of Books

Nothing has so warped our understanding of the 20th Century as the unfortunate
fact that America's wars were, in Bob Dole's felicitous phrase, "Democrat
Wars." The combination of historical circumstances which put Wilson,
FDR, Truman, and JFK in power to lead the United States into WWI, WWII,
The Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam has made it very difficult emotionally
for the institutional Left to criticize those conflicts. It is this
which explains the Left's strange silence as regards what we might otherwise
expect to hear them attack as a savage and unnatural product of military-industrial
capitalism. Fortunately for the Left, the accession of Richard Nixon
to the presidency in 1968 has allowed them to disown Vietnam, turning it
into the one conflict that has truly been diminished in the public eye.
Meanwhile, patriotism, even nativism, is such a powerful force on the Right
that conservatives have been reluctant to question these righteous and
glorious causes. These factors have combined to create
an artificial national consensus about American involvement in a series
of bloody and quite senseless wars.

At last though, in the past few years--not coincidentally following
the Cold War and the end of its dissent stifling effects--conservative
historians have finally begun to produce a coherent and fairly unified
critique of the century's great wars and of American (and British) participation
in them. The liberating winds of these new circumstances have
allowed folks to take a fresh look at a myriad of issues, allowed for A.
Scott Berg's rehabilitation of Charles
Lindbergh, permitted even standard issue histories like David
Kennedy's Freedom from Fear
to at long last acknowledge the utter failure of the New Deal, allowed
the nation to finally accept responsibility for the incarceration of Japanese-Americans,
and so forth. But most importantly, it has led to a series of books
on the threshold issue of whether fighting the wars was in our national
interest to begin with. For instance, Pat Buchanan's A
Republic not an Empire, though it was rather harshly denounced, raised
important questions about whether it made sense for the U. S. to get involved
in WWII. Niall Ferguson's Pity of War performs much
the some service for British participation in the First World War, and
was, not surprisingly, greeted with nearly equal vitriol.

Really more of an extended analytical essay than a history of the War,
Ferguson sets out to answer a series of ten questions :

(1) Was the war inevitable, whether
because of militarism, imperialism, secret diplomacy or the
arms race?

(2) Why did GermanyÃ­s leaders gamble
on war in 1914?

(3) Why did BritainÃ­s leaders choose
to intervene when war broke out on the Continent?

(4) Was the war, as is often asserted,
really greeted with popular enthusiasm?

(5) Did propaganda, and especially
the press, keep the war going...?

(6) Why did the huge economic superiority
of the British Empire not suffice to inflict defeat on
the Central Powers more quickly and without American intervention?

(7) Why did the military superiority
of the German Army fail to deliver victory over the British
and French armies on the Western Front, as it delivered victory over Serbia,
Rumania and Russia?

(8) Why did men keep fighting when,
as the war poets tell us, conditions on the battlefield were
so wretched?

(9) Why did men stop fighting?

(10) Who won the peace--to be precise,
who ended up paying for the war?

Because his answers to these questions are so uniformly at variance
with the accepted version of history, Ferguson concludes that Britain's
entry into the War was "nothing less than the greatest error of
modern history." He argues that Germany had no global war aims, that
she would have certainly won the war, but would have done little more than
establish the same type of European trade union that modern Germany is
rapidly creating. And given what Britain gave up, in terms of Empire,
lives, and economic retardation, the war must therefore be seen as a complete
waste.

I agree with those conclusions, but think he may actually be too timid
in his argument. One of the criticisms of his analysis has been that
Germany had wider aims and would have eventually confronted Britain.
This seems almost absurd. Unless the other nations of Europe had
truly collaborated with their conqueror it is hard to imagine how Germany
could have even effectively held onto them, never mind turn and attack
Britain while also subjugating the entire population of Europe.

There's also one strain that runs through the questions he asks, that
I would have liked to see him address--the effect of democracy. It
has long been assumed that democracy would tend to be more pacific than
other forms of government : how then explain the nearly continuous state
of war that the two great democracies, Britain and America, found themselves
involved in during the 20th Century ? There would seem to be a series
of interlocking causes, all functions of democracy, which contributed to
this unlikely state of affairs. First, democracies are more unlikely
to get involved in warfare in the first place. Opposing systems well
understand this fact and are able to exploit it, so that they arm and strengthen
themselves while democracies stand idly by and do nothing. If Britain
really did have something to fear from German naval, colonial, and continental
ambitions, the time to deal with Germany was twenty or more years earlier,
when she was still weak. Similarly, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan,
the Soviet Union, Red China, etc., were all allowed to build themselves
into serious military powers because Britain and America, their leaders
beholden to the will of the people, did not stop them.

Second, when war finally does come, it is precisely because it is a
democratic decision that our soldiers are likely to go right on fighting
even in squalid and lethal conditions. It is the totalitarian powers
which tend to have their armed forces quit on them, because, in some sense,
it simply isn''t their fight.

Finally, the political and cultural dynamics of democracy require that
every war the nation enters into be glorified and sanctified, because it
was the will of the people. This means that democracies are nearly
incapable of learning any lessons from these conflicts. To acknowledge
that the war was a mistake would perhaps be too traumatic to the polity
for such apostasy to stand. Thus, for all the cheap talk of "no more
Munichs" the West does nothing even today as China tries to turn itself
into a superpower, despite the obvious fact that their power will be aimed
directly at us.

The only remaining question, raised by books like this one and Pat Buchanan's
and the ones that will eventually be written about the futility of the
Cold War and the Gulf War, is whether when the next war comes, the democracies
(by which we really only mean Britain and America) will have sense enough
to stay out of it. If enough people read and comprehend The Pity
of War, we just might.